Hawarden WMO 03321 – Come Fly with me!

53.17553 -2.98646 Met Office rating CIMO Class 4 Opened 1/9/1944 moved between 2011 and 2015.

Airport site (Hawarden/Chester Airport) formerly RAF Bretton with a rich aviation history. Such airfield sites dominate not only the Met Office Synoptic and Climate reporting stations network but also the UK highest temperature recording sites.

It cannot be overstated how crucially important it is for detailed instant and immediate weather conditions reporting at every airfield for the benefit of pilots, air traffic control and the safety of passengers and crew of each and every flight. But are such sites really appropriate for reporting the natural environment and compiling climate records? This will be the topic of several other posts in future. For now the interesting story of Hawarden is the temperature recording in Wales and the potential for pursuing records.

Back on 2/8/1990 the highest ever temperature in Wales of 35.2°C was recorded not at Hawarden-Chester Airport but at Hawarden Bridge even nearer to England. Located at 53.21708 -3.02895 this was a very poor (likely Class 5) site behind a factory unit alongside its large car park. This somewhat inappropriate site was eventually closed 1/1/2005 – n.b. Tim Channon (instigator of the surface station project) noted how surprisingly common it is for record breaking sites to close not long after setting records notably Greycrook in Scotland and Cheltenham in Gloucestershire – a point for later discussion.

Whilst both England and Scotland were setting new high records in 2003, and 2019, that old rather suspect Welsh record stood firm – even the nearby airport site couldn’t quite break it. Then mysteriously the site moved. Here is Tim Channon’s review of the Hawarden Airport site back in 2012.

Compare the image from Tim’s report with that headline image above and it is evident the station has been moved just over 100 metres from a diagonal side route to a tee junction by a taxiway and service road.

Can any aviators reading this advise of any overall benefit to pilots in this relocation? None I have inquired of seems to think there is.

Can any meteorologists justify this relocation as improving the siting’s potential accuracy? Those I have spoken to suggest it is now in a much worse location in terms of reflecting the natural environment.

So was this relocation possibly record chasing? Well on 18/7/2022 a reading of 37.1°C was achieved on what was unquestionably a hot day and the record was finally broken. It does, however, beg the question that if the site had to be relocated due to the encroachment of new buildings in the vicinity, couldn’t the Met Office have simply put it a bit further away from likely extraneous heat sources? They were hardly short of space there. Or do we have a situation where questionable sites continuously have to be found to ramp up the figures – a bit like next to electricity sub stations, solar farms, in walled gardens, car parks, animal enclosures etc, etc ,etc ? Views anyone?